Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique well-regarded modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

I reached out on the Cairn discord to see if there were any up and coming module writers who’d be happy for me to review them, in the knowledge they were hobbyists. I got a good number of recommendations, which I’ll be tackling in upcoming months. One is, Ingrown Hairs. Ingrown Hairs is an 8-page module for Cairn by giantrobottackler. This is the definition of hobbyist: It’s on A4 paper, hand-drawn maps in Microsoft Paint, public domain art. But, one of the most acclaimed modules in recent release, Wolves Upon the Coast, ain’t got much in the way of layout, and relies on its writing to pull it through, so these reviews will be an excuse to focus on what’s important.

In terms of layout, Ingrown Hairs uses the A4 format very well spatially, with 1 location per column for the majority of the text. It uses a bullet-style presentation, which works well in this two-column format, although I think I’d do away with the dot points for the stat blocks and the exit descriptions, and distinguish them better with font choice and simply not being dot points. The paucity of fonts and point sizes in the text does contribute to a challenging read, but it’s functional. I especially like the touch of including sign (or what I tend to refer to as omens) on each of the exit choices.

The author opens with terse humour in a casual voice, and it works well in my opinion, although it probably needed a second person to read over it before going to print for some line-editing. I don’t mind the approach at all of writing an ostensibly horror module in a dry voice, but sadly the voice mainly exists in the introductory sections, where the location descriptions (the majority of the module) are in a drier descriptive style. I would have loved the humour to remain present throughout the module.

On the other hand, I really like the descriptions in the locations for the most part. They’re no more than three sentences per bullet point, and can be quite evocative, for example thorny vines “drawn slithering to blood, and a fresh supply causes them to become engorged and sluggish”, or a horse-sized crow “its skin itches with bark-filled bumps, desperate for growth”. It also has neat world-building clues scattered throughout, like “every good hearth has a small tending spirit, though most stay hidden”.

The authors good writing is held in tension with a lot of functional writing, particularly exit descriptions. My gut feeling is that here is where a better map may have made the module more runnable, because these descriptions could have been on the map rather than tagged onto the end of each location, and I’d spend less time looking forwards and backwards. The map actually shows a lot of information, and for a small number of locations (11 in total), it has some nice loops, including an additional route back to the village. Perhaps another solution that would fit a minimalist approach would be to number the paths.

Ingrown hairs is a damned good free module, all in all. Regardless of flaws, this is a module I could run from the paper without any preparation other than printing the map on a separate piece of paper and maybe labelling the paths on it for ease. It’s written well, and the mysterious author is one to keep an eye on for future modules, if this is anything to go on.

5th October, 2023

Idle Cartulary